


Jousting

by sunsmasher



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 11:22:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the end of the world as we know it, and we feel fine.</p>
<p>Fieri, not so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jousting

**Author's Note:**

> I'd originally meant to write a few more oneshots in this vein, maybe pull an actual coherent story out of them, but it's been six months, so let's just post this sucker.

The rapids are three feet deep. The water plunges past her at 44 feet per second. Her skirt is soaked up to her waist, miles of sodden fabric thrashing about her legs as she sets one foot against slick stone and stands against the river. The current won’t pull her over as long as she is certain it won’t, but Fieri lacks her mind, and the water drags him closer to the edge with every heaving breath.

He staggers forward anyways, screaming something she can’t hear over the avalanche thunder of the falls. She can’t hear much of anything except the wind and the river and water on stone, and she has a sudden terrible desire to hear bright cities again, as they existed along the banks long decades ago.

Fieri leaps for her, face fixed in shrieking anger, and she drives her needles deep into one eye and then the other. She feels his skull fragment beneath their points, jerks them sideways in his sockets to carve apart his brain, but she has to be sure. There’s nothing left to her now but her certainty, and as Dave has so often told her, it’s the ending they’ll remember. So she loops pink yarn back around his head and pushes his body beneath the water. With one heel dug between the vertebrae of his spine, foam spraying off his feet to soak her back, she rides him over the falls. If she shivers or flinches, or if she screams a little when the flat rock drops out and the big rocks come rushing up, there’s nobody to know.

—

Dave, when he sees two bodies fall with the lake water into the rapids below, screams a lot.

“ROSE!” he roars, shoving off the old parkway, chunks of cement falling from the eroded banks as the UNREAL AIR skitters into flight. The piece of shit jerks and scrabbles midair, almost throwing him twice before the he reaches the point where the foam soaks him through and he can’t see shit for the spray of the falls, no sign of a fair-haired woman in the dark water. He pulls his shades from his face in a fury, rakes his eyes across the violent pool again and again.

“You weren’t supposed to jump!” he screams at the rapids, “You weren’t supposed to go off a damn waterfall, you crazy bitch! You were—“ There’s a flash of pale in the water and no hesitation. Dave leaps from the UNREAL AIR in a poor attempt at a swan dive, terror scrawled across him in capital letters and block print.

The water is fuck-off cold, hits him like eighteen wheeler to the sternum, but through the dark and the current he can see something white and sinking and he goes for it. He kicks and struggles, clawing at the water if it’d get him any closer, but for every foot he pushes forward he’s thrown back three. He can feel his muscles start to seize and in a panic he launches forward, one hand stretched out. But the current’s pulled him too far back and the single pale glimpse is swallowed by the depths, so much greater than the heights above, several worlds away from him. The river wrenches him back against a rock and he screams, the last dregs of air escaping his lungs as he loses sight of his target.

A hand grabs him by the collar, just below the surface, and pulls.

“Get up!” Rose screams, hauling his head clear of the water as he vomits up the Niagara. She’s latched herself to the lee of the rock as the river batters him against the front, eyes wide and glowing wild in the blinding spray. Yarn looped around her wrist anchors the UNREAL AIR whipping like a paper flag in the gale above, and he heaves his upper body out of the water with a groan. Water still pours from his mouth and nose and someone’s crushed his rib cage like a beer can at a frat party but if he wavers for a second the current’ll tear him off the rock and that’ll be it, he’s done, couldn’t save the world couldn’t even save himself, hope they don’t read off your life failures standing before those pearly gates because that’s a list that won’t reach its finish before the end of the world comes ‘round for a second time to put its foot up your ass.

“Dave, GET UP!”

She’s still got his shirt in her first, arm stretched over the peak of the rock, and she shakes him home to the thundering water and her eyes locked on his. “Grab the thread!” she roars, and he closes a freezing hand over hers, helping her tow the UNREAL AIR in.

She slings an arm over, then a leg, her skirts flapping heavy and water-logged in the hurricane winds off the water, smacking wet against his face when he looks up. She pulls him up and he lets go of the rock, flopping against her in a sopping, gasping heap as the storm winds off the water rip them downstream.

“I thought it was you!” Dave screams over the falls, the cascade echoing off the gorge. “The body in the water! I thought it had gone wrong, you were dead!”

Rose wraps her arms around his neck. “Not yet!” she shouts into his shoulder.

—

They’re a couple of miles north, drifting over back and forth over a border that was never very definite even when Canada was still inhabited. The winds have died to a mere brisk drift, although the rapids still churn below them. Rose can tell they’re coming up on the remains of the dams. Massive chunks of concrete litter the gorge, and the air’s begun to stink of rotting Faygo from the reservoirs.

“Woman,” Dave grumbles, “I am fifty five years old. Used to be people were grandparents at my age, given enough tolerably comfortable pick up beds and abstinence-only education. If you jump off a fucking waterfall again, I’ll be waiting in the damn car.”

“Have you ever, even once in your life, owned a car. Do you even know how to drive one,” Rose asks the top of his head. He’s slumped against her, his back to her front, head level with her nose. Her words are warm against his scalp, and her nose is full of the smell of river water and old, diluted soda. Their legs dangle free over the sides of the UNREAL AIR.

“Don’t think I didn’t hear that punctuation, you heathen. This is God’s country; we end our questions with question marks around here, not sassy little deadpan periods,” he mutters, waving a hand above his head. “And for your information, public transportation was the Bucephalus to my Alexander for years before you showed up with your hoity-toity town cars and long-ass driveways. Fucking noble steed, it was.”

The wind pulls them around a bend in the gorge and Lake Ontario comes into view, some taller buildings still visible in the shallows. Rose has seen the lake once before, on a field trip in fourth grade, and she thinks the glove she left in the sand would be under a number of feet of water now, if she hadn’t left it behind in 1989.

“I suspect Rocinante and Don Quixote might be a more apt comparison, my good sir knight.”

Dave huffs, and at her prompting, shifts his weight left. They peel off from the cliff face and begin to rise.

“Yeah, yeah, the buses were shit and I’m a loon, leave me alone.” His hands lie folded over his stomach, and she rests hers on his wrists. Her skin is still slate grey, although what color left in her hair has returned, and Dave runs a finger over her knuckles.

“I meant it more with the implication of our long and storied history of tilting at windmills,” she says, “But take it how you will.”

“Hey now,” he says, after a beat, “we were jousting giants. It was the rest of the world that saw windmills.”

“Not that it made much of a difference in the end, of course.”

They lean back around south, Rose setting the course. Vast tracts spread before them as they clear the lip of the canyon, and in the absence of the lights of civilization, the Milky Way is a clear white smear across the sky. A whisper in the back of her mind draws Rose’s eye to movement in one of the towns not yet fallen into the river, but even were she able to discern friend from foe at this distance, she’s lost all ability to help. They fly on.

“No,” Dave sighs. “Not much.”

He leans forward, breaking the circle of her arms, and raps a knuckle against the UNREAL AIR. It flickers for a second, like film missing a frame.

“This isn’t going to last too much longer before it derezzes,” he says. “Where’s your car?”

“Buffalo,” she replies.

He gives her a despairing look. “You mean the Buffalo that’s thirty miles upstream.”

“Exactly the one,” she smiles.

As the look continues, growing mature and wizened in its despair, she explains with a shrug, “He ran, I gave chase. For a small, fat, man with disgusting hair, Fieri got astonishingly far before I put needles in his brain. The Condesce chose well in her Chaplain, loath though I am to afford her any small praise.”

Dave heaves a sigh, all melodramatic slumping of shoulders and hanging of head. “So when we get back to your car in a century or two, should we survive the passing of ages,” he asks, “where next?”

There’s more to the question, a few lifetimes of things he hasn’t asked, but Rose suspects she’s spent far more than a few lifetimes in his company, as these things are counted.

“We’ll follow the canal back to Albany,” she says, pushing him to lean forward on the board. It begins to pick up sped. “The roads are clearest along the water, and I don’t think it’s topped its banks just yet. I’d like a shower, I don’t know about you, and then after that I suppose we go south.”

“South,” he repeats, and the wind’s picking up as they gain speed, whipping the last of Rose’s up-do to strands and pieces. “Manhattan.”

An ashy leaf catches against Dave’s arm, torn off again in half a second. He pulls his shades from his jacket and places them over his eyes.

“Yes,” she smiles, and sees her own face move in the mirrored glass.


End file.
